Finalist for The QSPELL Prize for Poetry in 1989

Blue Sand, Blue Moon is a book of voyages, excursions into history and place that send the poet and his listener deeper into the recesses of the mind. In this spare and evocative first book of poems, Mark Abley touches down in various sites of loss in Turkey and the Far East, taking stock of social conditions and his own states of soul. The work ranges from the personal lyrics and meditations of his Asian mass to very fine translations of the work of the Quebec poet Emile Nelligan.